Spring is a Cycle of Chances

By KM Huber

The cycle of seasons is nature’s mirror, ours for the viewing. Mostly, we celebrate the dawn of a new season if not the length of time nature takes to make the change.

We assign spring a date, anticipating an event that may or may not arrive as assigned. Its arrival is a bit of a mystery. Yet, in a moment of grace, nature unfolds in its own time, in its own way.

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.

Anne Lamott

I do not understand the mystery, either, but I am content for the experience of it. All I do know is that grace transforms. And like spring, it is its own mystery.

Grace flows with the majesty of a meandering river. Part of its mystery is the gradual eroding of its course, without beginning or end. We do not know the precise moment we are transformed. We only know that we are.

In grace, we do not wallow or stagnate but discover and re-discover the spring of our lives not so much as to re-live but to be reborn in yet another season.

Spring is not a one-time event.

Grace moves us to deeds we once thought impossible. In each spring in our life, we emerge anew. Grace allows us to bare ourselves as we are—to take the risk again—to meet each new spring we are given.

We have only one body—and it ages–but we have the gift of grace to transform our lives, to meet yet another spring. Our seasons cycle within our hearts, bold with the opportunity each affords.

We need not remain wrapped in winter, blanketed in its protective shell. Like nature, ours is not to stagnate or to wallow but to transform from a winter’s day into a spring’s blossom. It is the way of grace.

The bud opens, and life begins anew, yet again. There is grace in this falling away of one season for another, radical change replete with uncertainty.

As we are revealed so are we seen. Grace unlocks our softness.

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KM Huber is a writer who learned Zen from a beagle. She believes the moment is all we ever have, and it is enough. In her early life as a hippie, she practiced poetry, and although her middle years were a bit of a muddle, she remains an overtly optimistic sexagenerian, writing prose. She blogs at kmhubersblog.com, may be followed on Twitter @KM_Huber or contacted by email at writetotheranch[at]gmail[dot]com.